Floating Solar Chimney Technology.pdf

10 Floating Solar Chimney Technology Christos D. Papageorgiou National Technical University of Athens Greece 1. Introduction 1.1 Floating Solar Chimney technology description The purpose of this chapter is to present the Floating solar chimney (FSC) technology, look for the site www.floatingsolarchimney.gr, in order to explain its principles of operation and to point out its various significant benefits. This technology is the advisable one for candidacy for large scale solar electricity generation especially in desert or semi desert areas of our planet and a major technology for the global warming elimination. The solar chimney power plants are usually referred to as solar updraft towers (/wiki/Solar_updraft_tower) and the related solar chimneys are huge reinforced concrete structures. However due to the high construction cost of the concrete solar chimneys the solar up-draft tower technology is expensive demanding a high initial investment in comparison to its competitive solar technologies. Their solar up-draft towers are huge structures of high initial investment cost that can not be split into small units. That is possible for the relatively also expensive PV solar technology. Also the solar updraft technology is far more expensive compared to the conventional fossil fueled power plants of similar electricity generation. That is why the solar chimney technology has not yet been applied although it is a solar technology of many advantage